No pics (yet), so far the babies are only a seed with a tiny button of root sticking out!

Sorry for not being clear. I received 14 seeds on February 8. I grow many many things, but I rarely do any seed starting -- and I've never started any clivias before. I do have 4 other young clivias from a previous trade, but none of them are variegated. These seeds are from variegated mommas, so I'm dying to see how they turn out! Half are supposed to be from a "regular" variegated plant, and the other half are from a variegated Light of Buddha.

btw -- another one has germinated today. :-) I thought clivias were supposed to take weeks and weeks to germinate, so I'm very pleased so far!

The fresher the seed the faster it seems to germinate. I've had a few germinate in 3 days, some will even germinate without any help at all. I lost a bag of seed last spring, and when i realized I hadn't planted it (I was real busy) and found it 18 out of 25 were already germinated, just from sitting around in a ziploc bag. All but 1 germinated in the end.

Fresh seeds are smooth and shiney, older seeds look kind of dried and rough. If you ever get any old seeds soak them in water for about 5 days before doing anything else, they actually seem to rehydrate. I was recently sent some old seed with a note that said "I hope they germinate for you", out of 15 seeds all but 3 germinated, and 1 might still, 2 were definately bad. I was over joyed since some of it was from a really nice bright red, and the others from a good apricot.

Yeah, I think I'm probably cheating a bit on the germination time. The seeds were mailed in ziplocs with damp paper towels, and they took three weeks to arrive, so they were working on germinating during all of that shipping time. But I'm going to take the credit anyway! ;-)

There is one obvious dud in the set of seeds -- one that floated when I soaked them all -- but I'm hoping at least 10 of the 14 eventually sprout. Crossing my fingers!

Sure enough -- the "dud" has germinated! In fact, the only seed from that batch (I have two sets of 7 seeds) that has NOT germinated yet is a nice fat smooth shiny one. Oh well!

I now have 12 of 14 germinated. Doing the happy dance! Of course, now comes the hard part -- getting em planted without too much shock or damage, and waiting around to see how many are either albino or not variegated at all....

I unexpectedly purchased a new home in another town, back in the spring. So, all of a sudden, I ended up spending the last few months trying to get stuff fixed up at the new place and then moving tons and tons and tons of stuff from one place to the other. I'm living in the new place now, but still not nearly done with the old place. Anyway, because of all that I severely neglected a lot of the seedlings.....and many of them ended up fungusing. They were doing their part, though!

I'm going to try again this winter. If I can just get settled in and back to some sort of sanity, I'm sure I'll do much better with the next batch!